Robert Green Ingersoll

As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.

Every human being should be taught that his first duty is to take care of himself, and that to be self-respecting he must be self-supporting. To live on the labor of others, either by force which enslaves, or by cunning which robs, or by borrowing or begging, is wholly dishonorable. Every man should be taught some useful art.

Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government - the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more.

The idea that there is a God who rewards and punishes, and who can reward, if he so wishes, the meanest and vilest of the human race, so that he will be eternally happy, and can punish the best of the human race, so that he will be eternally miserable, is subversive of all morality.

Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.

This is my creed: Happiness is the only good; reason the only torch; justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.

The way to be happy is to make others so.

I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.

Every fact in the universe will fit every other fact in the universe. A lie never did, never will fit anything but another lie made to fit it. Never, never!

Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers: It is the only prayer that deserves an answer—good, honest, noble work.

A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains, he gives to others.

In spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God.

Small people delight in what they call consistency-that is, it gives them immense pleasure to say that they believe now exactly as they did ten years ago. This simply amounts to a certificate that they have not grown-that they have not developed-and that they know just as little now as they ever did. The highest possible conception of consistency is to be true to the knowledge of today, without the slightest reference to what your opinion was years ago.

The Church says the Earth is flat. But I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the Moon. And I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.

We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know.

Everyone should be taught the nobility of labor, the heroism and splendor of honest effort. As long as it is considered disgraceful to labor, or aristocratic not to labor, the world will be filled with idleness and crime, and with every possible moral deformity.

Voltaire! A name that excites the admiration of men, the malignity of priests. Pronounce that name in the presence of a clergyman, and you will find that you have made a declaration of war.

Our fathers knew that the flag was never intended to protect any man who wanted to assail it.

Whoever labors for the happiness of those he loves elevates himself, no matter whether he works in the dreary shop or the perfumed field.

I say, let us think. Let each one express his thought. Let us become investigators, not followers, not cringers and crawlers. If there is in Heaven an infinite being, he never will be satisfied with the worship of cowards and hypocrites.

If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them. If slaves are freed, man must free them. If new truths are discovered, man must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected, and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of man. The grand victories of the future must be won by man, and by man alone.